Tiempo Climate Newswatch

"We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades," said Mohamed Nasheed, newly elected president of the Maldives, as he announced that a proportion of tourism revenues would be invested in buying a new homeland. "We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome."

"It's an unprecedented wake-up call," commented Tom Picken of Friends of the Earth. "The Maldives is left to fend for itself. It is a victim of climate change caused by rich countries," he continued. Land may be purchased in countries such as India or Sri Lanka with similar cultures, cuisines and climates or else in Australia, where unoccupied land is available. A formal request by Australia's Greens party last month for the country to grant special visas to Tuvaluan climate change refugees was denied. "The question [of relocation] needs to be sorted out by all 50 territories that stand to be affected by rising sea levels," Scott Leckie of Displacement Solutions in Geneva, Switzerland.

Participants at the Road to Copenhagen 2009 conference, held in Brussels on November 6th, have called for more climate justice in the next round of climate treaty negotiations, which takes place in Poznań, Poland, next month. "Now that we have the scientific evidence on climate change, we have to cope with the justice dimension," said Mary Robinson of the Global Humanitarian Forum. "Clean energy technologies must be developed not only for use on a large scale in industrialized economies, but also on an appropriate scale for least-developed countries based on their needs," she continued.

"We can't afford to go for the short-term perspective because of the [global financial] crisis," stressed Margot Wallström, vice-president of the European Commission. "We need strong leadership and I hope the European Union will continue to demonstrate a strong commitment." Nicholas Stern, the British economist, described as "muddled thinking" claims that the financial crisis would undermine European plans for ambitious action on climate. "These two crises coming together give a fundamental opportunity," he said.

A new report suggests that billions of tons of carbon held in peat bogs could be released into the atmosphere as global warming develops. "Peat bogs contain vast stores of carbon," commented lead author Paul Moorcroft at Harvard University in the United States. "They will likely respond to the expected warming in this century by losing large amounts of carbon during dry periods."

The carbon release would occur as higher temperatures cause water tables to drop, causing more peat to dry and decompose. "Over several centuries, some 40 per cent of carbon could be lost from shallow peat bogs, while the losses could total as much as 86 per cent in deep bogs," Moorcroft predicts. The assessment is based on a more sophisticated analysis of the interaction between the water table, temperatures and peat accumulation than previously available.